Looks like ASUS is launching a "premium" 10.2-inch netbook, the ASUS N10. This one comes without the Eee branding and is obviously meant for the image conscious. Digitimes is reporting the price at €330 to €430, but really there are few hard facts available yet. Blogeee.net has more pictures. Is anyone else as tired as me of all the various ASUS netbook/sub-notebook variations? Blogee (French / Google Translation) [via Engadget]

Bluegiga, a company based in Finland, is offering what it claims to be the "smallest Bluetooth Access Point in the industry."  The BT AP runs an embedded Linux OS on a 200MHz ARM9 processor.

The heart of Access Point 3201 is Bluegiga’s customized Linux operating system with a number of built- in applications, such as SPP-over-IP and ObexSender (for Bluetooth marketing). For Bluetooth wireless technology, the product has extremely advanced, reliable and easy-to-use software interface called iWRAP, which enables you to connect your Bluetooth equipped devices into TCP/IP networks with built-in security and reliability.

To me, at least, it seems like a rather awesome product. I simply find it amazing how much can be packed into so little space. Not to mention the inherit coolness of running Linux on something that tiny. [gallery] Bluegiga [via LinuxDevices.com]

A new version of Songbird, a popular open source media player based on Firefox, has been released.  Version 0.7 beta brings with it, among other features and improvements:

• A new UI
• Faster scanning for media files on your hard drive
• Drag and drop support
• Smart playlists
• Built-in album art support

The best way to find out whether Songbird is for you is, as alwasy with FOSS apps, to try it out. Songbird [via Heise]

Linux.com has a great article covering some ways in which open source software can help students, whether they be in high school or university.  The article only covers math and chemistry tools, such as "TiLP, wxMaxima, Kalzium, Gnome Chemistry Utils, and OpenOffice.org Math," but I think that there's a lot more out there for students of all professions. What student would not benefit from using OpenOffice.org instead of the (expensive) MS Office, not to mention free graphics tools such as Paint.NET, The GiMP, InkScape etc.  Of course everyone can save money by using a free OS such as Ubuntu, Fedora or any other flavour of Linux. What are you're favourite FOSS tools?  Any that are particularly well suited for students? Linux.com

Seems that ATI/AMD is becoming more and more Linux friendly.

[Today they announced] CrossFire and OverDrive support for Linux [through Catalyst 8.8 drivers].  Phoronix has a complete run-down on both features — including benchmarks — in their AMD OverDrive on Linux and ATI Radeon CrossFire On Linux articles. Other features were also introduced in this update such as Linux 2.6.26 kernel support, Adaptive Anti-Aliasing, and other fixes.

• Phoronix
  • AMD OverDrive On Linux
  • ATI Radeon CrossFire On Linux

[Via Slashdot]

Dell has announced that they are equipping a range of enterprise laptops with their "Latitude ON" subsystem, which allows nearly instant access to a Linux desktop that can be used for simple tasks such as email, web browsing etc. Dell has previewd the system on new Latitude E4200 and E4300 models, but few other details are available. LinuxDevices.com

If this site has been acting up or exceptionally slow for you during the last 24 hours, the reason was probably that a link to the Dell sub-notebook story got posted on the front page of Slashdot.  This resulted in a whopping 3.5GiB of traffic during the last 24 hours.  As you can imagine, this was not a server load we anticipated having.

Dell's entry into the sub-notebook market, the Inspiron 910, will ship with Ubuntu preinstalled. This was confirmed this morning when Gizmodo published (leaked) specifications for the Inspiron 910.

The specifications also show that the device includes an 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 1GB of RAM, and an 8.9" screen with support for a resolution of 1024x600. It will also include a built-in camera, solid-state drives ranging between 4GB and 16GB, a VGA port, a media card reader, WiFi, and 3 USB ports. Rumors indicate that the base model could be priced as low as $299.

Gizmodo [via Ars Technica]

In an interview with ZDNet Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, talks about the adversities of becoming a Linux kernel developer.  Among other things, he advises new contributors to "start small" by sending "trivial patches".

"It's definitely not easy to become a 'big contributor'," wrote Torvalds. "For one thing, the kernel is quite complex and big, and it inevitably simply takes time to learn all the rules — not just for the code, but for how the whole development environment works. Similarly, for a new developer, it will take time before people start recognising the name and start trusting the developer to do the right things." However, Torvalds argued that Linux kernel processes do make it easy to contribute small patches. "[We] make it fairly easy for people to ease into kernel development," wrote Torvalds. "It seems to be working too. We literally have thousands of people with patches attributed to them in each release."

ZDNet [via Slashdot]

While I myself have done little more than play around with it a couple of times, I know that entire generations have had their first programming experiences with Pascal.  If you are/were part of the Pascal-crowd, you can have a look at Free Pascal, an open source compiler for Pascal and Object Pascal.

Free Pascal (aka FPK Pascal) is a 32 and 64 bit professional Pascal compiler. It is available for different processors: Intel x86, Amd64/x86_64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, Sparc, ARM. The discontinued 1.0 version also supports the Motorola 680x0. The following operating systems are supported: Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, Mac OS classic, DOS, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, Netware (libc and classic) and MorphOS.

Free Pascal [via Techie Blog]